4 Dangerously Influential Dimwits

#2. Tom Cruise

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My fellow Cracked columnist and the guy who I share a cot with at the Cracked offices, Adam Tod Brown, recently wrote a piece in favor of Tom Cruise and why he gets unfairly shit on. And while I agree with him, as a reader pointed out to him later on Facebook, there is one big issue with Cruise that is not so easily forgiven, and that's his insane devotion to Scientology's hatred of psychiatry.

Psychiatrists are not the devil. I looked into it, and very few are even partially demonic. Scientology believes that psychiatry is a Nazi science and that its history is rife with abuse and fraud. The history of abuse and fraud that Scientology also carries around is therefore ironic and thus hilarious as well.

Cruise has stated publicly that there are no such things as chemical imbalances in the human body and that psychiatry is a pseudoscience. There's such an abundance of evidence that psychiatry and medications like antidepressants do work, however, that it's borderline insane to even start a debate on the subject. Questioning their efficacy is kind of like questioning Lindsay Lohan's acting skills. What do you gain by doing that anymore?

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Like, it's like, Romeo, Romeo, where are the for?

Now, the star of Vanilla Sky ranting about stupid shit may not seem like a big deal to you and me, but remember too that Cruise's beliefs are the beliefs of Scientology, and they have actively sought to promote legislation that would criminalize the use of some drugs, especially for kids. So if your child has ADHD and needs medication, Cruise and friends want to see you punished for giving it to him, because in their minds your child just needs to give them a lot of money and get rid of the alien souls that are sucking the life force from their anus, or whatever logical thing it is that Scientology believes.

Scientologists have also managed to weasel into grade schools to deliver anti-drug programs filled with all manner of cockamamie lies and misinformation for kids, like how dependency sets in on your first dose of a drug and how it will be stored in your body fat and come back to haunt you weeks or even years later, like some kind of crazy antidepressant flashback.

#1. Political Policy Makers

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Don't get your panties in a twist, Republicans, I'm mainly interested in the policymakers here on both sides of the fence. But to starts with you, the GOP has, in recent years, become the party of saying or doing anything to pander to the most voters it can. It doesn't really have principles anymore, it just wants you to agree with it in a way that is at odds with liberal beliefs. At any cost. And unfortunately, legitimate things like fiscal conservatism have taken a back seat to rampant social conservatism and the touting of hardcore religious beliefs, neither of which should be at the forefront of any political party's platform due to rampant suckitude and shittiness. The result of this is the emergence and spread of things like creationism in schools.

Sit down, kids, you need to hear this -- creationism is not true. And what's more, you can have faith and still understand science. They work together, they really do.

To a certain group of conservatives in the GOP, science and faith are at odds all the time, like Jon Cryer and that Kutcher fellow on Two and a Half Men, I assume, having not watched the show since Episode 2, Season 1. Worse still, some believe that science is liberal and open for debate. It's really not. Science has no politics; it just is. It doesn't want to prove you or me wrong -- it just wants to prove the truth. Science is impartial all the time, even if scientists aren't always. But when people like Donald Trump make climate change a political issue, or others make creationism vs. evolution an issue, it politicizes something that has no business in that realm and, what's more, it makes it seem like it's open for debate. It's not. There is no debate. If you think you can question science, everyone else reserves the right to question what order they get to shtoop your mother.

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Get ready for such a shtooping.

Even now, as the Republican Party looks forward to 2016, some of the members that the media is projecting as potential frontrunners to lead the party are being asked questions like how old they feel the Earth is, another question you don't get to have an opinion on, because science already has the answer, and they're either outright refusing to answer or tossing out ridiculous answers like "It's a mystery." You know what's a mystery? What happened to Jennifer Connelly's boobs. The age of the Earth is pretty straightforward.

No one has a choice to believe in evolution any more than they can choose to believe that the sun is hot or that shit stinks. But because some people, either willfully or otherwise, are ignorant of the facts, the GOP has latched onto this and made it a rallying cry. They've turned their policies vs. Democratic policies into God vs. atheist non-believers, or working people against dirty, freeloading hippies. They make it seem like people who want to teach evolution are anti-God and want to rob you of your Christianity, and then it's a slippery slope into gay marriage and welfare checks and heroin overdoses for everyone, isn't it?

But evolution isn't an attack on Christianity. It's science showing you where people who didn't have answers way back in the day got it wrong. It happens. A lot of stuff in the Bible is wrong, and we've come to accept much of that, unless you're holding hard to the law that calls shellfish an abomination or that part in Leviticus that supports slavery. By continuing the faulty debate, on this and any other issues, it sets the country at odds and creates an artificial and ignorant discord solely for the sake of ensuring that people never come together and maybe start to work on bigger problems. It's meant to ensure that you support your party and they support their party and we never find cause to meet in the middle, and it's a dirty-ass trick.

Across the aisle, Dems aren't above selling out to avoid ruffling feathers as witnessed by their hasty inclusion of God and Israel in the party platform. When Republicans saw it was missing, starched and uptight eyebrows were raised. The response was a rushjob to change the language to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and specify people's potential as "god-given" because you want to make sure the opposition approves of your wording when you're running a political campaign, lest someone think you have different ideas.

The liberal media does a disservice to Conservatives as well by choosing the best and brightest twat waffles from the right to keep on the news at all times. In fact, the conservative media is complicit in this as well, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Could you ever get a liberal to agree with any fiscally conservative platform, even one that was 100% sensible and reasonable, if it was being presented by a troll like Bill O'Reilly? Or Ann Couler? Or Glenn Beck? These people are living, breathing shit puddles who sensationalize everything and make it objectionable. The right will never win over the left with fools like this and the left will never listen to the right because they raise the blowhards up and pretend they represent the party as a whole when really they only represent the small but vocal group of prolapsed anuses that somehow learned to speak.

Of course, nowhere was the Democratic machine more in weak, wussy form than in Obama's first debate in which he let Mitt Romney dance a mudhole in him with a good natured smile on his face. And why? Because the GOP goes for the throat while Democrats are happy to just sit back and hope for the best. The entire debate was a really delightful microcosm of current American politics as a whole. Mitt Romney told lies convincingly, Barack Obama let them slide and tried really hard to explain what he thought was best. One side lies, the other closes its eyes and sings "lalala" really loud and then they wait to see if more than 50% of people are standing behind them when it's done.

Fact is, political discourse is broken right now. Issues are never issues, reactions and scare mongering are what wins elections. A huge number of people are ill informed about what they need, what could help them and how they can attain it. And politicians aren't going to educate uninformed voters, they're going to herd them like cattle by dangling prizes. Are you ignorant and hateful of gay people? We're going to ban gay marriage and maybe send them all to France, where gay comes from. Are you ignorant and in need of health insurance? Vote for me and I'll make sure that herpes gets cleared right up!

The problem with running a country like America is that it is not simple. 300 million people need a lot of shit in order to be happy and productive. It's not easy but the majority of those 300 million want it to be easy. They want easy answers, easy lives and easy decisions. So policy makers cherry pick simple ideas, they manufacture drama that you can understand and point you in the direction they want you to go, and then they do whatever they want afterwards because the election's over and you can't do shit about it for the next 4 years anyway. Enjoy those herpes, yo.